Reviews with content warning for Police brutality - Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

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Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

7 reviews

fkshg8465's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative sad slow-paced

5.0

The more I read and learn and understand how institutionalized racism started and continues to be reinforced, the more I fear for this country.

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savvylit's review against another edition

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challenging informative medium-paced

4.0

Evicted is an enlightening glimpse into a reality that may not be familiar to all readers: the absolutely devastating and all-consuming effects of being evicted in the United States. Desmond reveals the juxtaposition between the ease with which landlords can evict their residents and the lingering difficulties that their tenants will face as a result. Once someone has been evicted, they are often forced into increasingly unsafe rentals that are the only option for someone whose background check reads "evicted." Furthermore, crippling debt and shame associated with eviction tend to follow folks for years as they attempt to seek stability. It was absolutely heartbreaking to follow many of these families as they faced homelessness or unsafe housing in between evictions.

For an informative nonfiction book, Evicted was immensely readable. I couldn't help but turn each page, hoping for each tenant to find a stable home. I also found myself increasingly disgusted by both landlords and the criminal justice system for their ability to take away a basic human right (shelter) with seeming ease or even righteousness.

Another aspect of Evicted that I enjoyed was Desmond's postscript regarding how he conducted the research for this book. I had wondered how involved he'd become in the lives of the folks that he followed and I appreciated his addressing that question. I think that Desmond's explanation of ethnography was fascinating and I was also pleased to read that he had developed genuine friendships with a lot of the interviewees.

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zombiezami's review against another edition

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I started reading this after reading Poverty, By America. I was very underwhelmed by that book, but I thought I'd try this since it's earlier and I wanted to know more about the author's specific research. Right away, the book felt super voyeuristic. I kept being bothered by the question of, "Did he get informed consent from the victims of eviction he recorded?" One of the early anecdotes in the book is the author tagging along with a landlord who's about to evict a number of people. Based on the high tensions implicit in the verbal back-and-forth, this made me even more tense. I kept wondering if he was trying to do some both-sidesism here. It could be the case that questions of methodology are answered later on or in the notes (I was listening to the audiobook, so I couldn't see those), but I'm not willing to stick around long enough to find out.

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albernikolauras's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

A heart-wrenching nonfiction book following families in Milwaukee that were evicted during the 2008 and 2009 recession. Desmond gives each individual humanity within his writing as he describes them without judgment or censor, from the landlords to the eviction company to the individuals left homeless afterward.

There wasn't a moment that you didn't feel the anger and frustration that we choose to treat people this way - as if their life doesn't matter. Desmond is clear about the ripple effect instable housing has on people - emotionally and physically - and the community they live in. How it effects the children stuck in this cycle, hopping from school to school while balancing taking care of their siblings.

Desmond wraps up the book describing his place within these situations, how he lived near them, when he intervened to help the families he followed, and what we can do to help prevent the worst of this. It is frightening that this has likely only gotten worse with the increasing housing prices and cost of living with no real increase in government support.

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junefish's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

4.25

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katsudonburi's review against another edition

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challenging informative sad slow-paced

5.0

A brutal and incredibly upsetting look at poverty and the damage eviction does to people and their families; what keeps it from reading as trauma porn is the author's deep commitment to the humanity of his subjects and constant examination of the systems that have not so much failed them as been designed to exploit them.

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sherbertwells's review against another edition

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challenging informative reflective sad medium-paced

3.0

“We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord.” (5)

Evicted by Matthew Desmond challenged my biases.

Not my biases about poverty; it pretty much confirmed my perspective there. Landlords buy properties, neglect them and take advantage of racialized poverty to fatten their own pockets. Poor women, especially single mothers, face a nigh-impossible struggle to build a stable home. Neighborhoods and the availability of housing can improve or destabilize a person’s life.

I believed these things before reading Evicted and Desmond’s extensive footnotes didn’t contradict them. The bias that Evicted overturned was a subtle parasite that I didn’t know had made a home in my system: the bias against sociologists.

As the child of an urban historian (one who studies Milwaukee, no less), I was raised believing in the gaslamp of context, the noble, futile quest through years of obfuscation and the sacred darkness of the unknowable. Compared to valiant historians, sociologists seemed to have it easy. If they wanted to do research, they could just step outside and interview their neighbors!

But Desmond’s solid storytelling opened my eyes to the potential of a good sociologist, which he is. Specifically, he’s an ethnologist, one whose front-line research forms the backbone of Evicted. The book follows several families—some living in a trailer park on Milwaukee’s white South Side, others living in predominately-black North Side slums—face eviction during the winter of 2008, when America’s housing crisis led to widespread displacement among low-income households. Their individual journeys paint a portrait of poverty in the 21st century, humanizing a group that wealthy and middle-class readers might otherwise demonize, victimize or otherwise simply ignore.

“People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to” (219).

While the stories of renters like Arleen, Scott and Larraine provide remarkable testimony on the experiences of being poor in America, Desmond’s scholarship is what makes Evicted convincing. The footnotes go on for 79 pages—25% of the length of the actual story—and provide illuminating explanations as well as citations for everything from Carol Stack’s All Our Kin to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Desmond strikes an efficient balance between dramatizing his subjects and demonstrating his scholarly credentials.

But there’s still something missing from Desmond’s work, something whose absence ultimately hurts his argument: history. Desmond insists that Evicted “tells an American story” because its setting is indicative of the condition of many major American cities (5). But in Milwaukee history, city government has played a larger-than-average role in shaping residents' living situations. Desmond concedes that “Milwaukee used to be flush with good jobs” in the early 20th century, but neglects to mention that these conditions were created by a string of Socialist mayors who encouraged labor unions, public works and welfare programs, and who faded from the spotlight in the 1960s as white working-class voters felt threatened by Milwaukee’s growing African-American population. A deeper examination of the history of segregation in Milwaukee would also aid Desmond’s arguments about the differences between white and black renters’ experiences. But it’s also possible that I have not completely overcome my bias against sociologists.

Evicted was my first foray into sociological nonfiction, as I imagine that it was for many of the 66,954 readers who left ratings of the book on Goodreads. It probably won’t be my last. Unlike many ethnologists, Desmond chooses to remove himself from the central narrative; an afterword explains his relationships to the subjects and his role in the events of the story. When documenting an issue as large as America’s problems with urban housing, he claims, “‘I’ don’t matter” (335).

Perhaps that’s a lesson I need to take to heart. Evicted is a good book with a strong message about a big problem, and if it changes American housing for the better, I would feel nothing but pride.

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